Thomas Serres

On Tuesday 14 October, I received a text from a friend—an activist who lives in the center of Algiers: “Urgent: the police are marching on Algiers. They are protesting next to my apartment, this is the end!” The protests started in the basin of Ghardaïa, eventually reaching the capital. One might have the impression that the structure of power in Algeria is suddenly threatening to collapse. Surely, this social movement in particular raises important questions. In a ...

Football is the greatest of all sports. And yet, despite the beauty of the game, what happens can become so distasteful that it is difficult to continue watching. I cannot help but feel that during the World Cup, a wide coalition of imbeciles is actively plotting to ruin my pleasure. I am not speaking of Luis Suarez and the biting incident but instead of France and Algeria. If you are following the competition, you already know that Algeria qualified for the knockout stage ...

The Algerian regime can be understood as an economic cartel. It is, in other words, an assemblage of actors that controls a field (the State), and must agree on certain things in order to assure its benefits – whether they are material or symbolic. These actors are of different stripes (military, technocrats, politicians) and do not need to agree on all of the actions or decisions taken by the government. Instead, they often find themselves in disaccord or in competition, ...

[This is one of six pieces in Jadaliyya's electronic roundtable on the anniversary of the Algerian Revolution. Moderated by Muriam Haleh Davis, it features contributions from Ed McAllister, James McDougall, Malika Rahal, Natalya Vince, Samuel Everett, and Thomas Serres.]
In this article, I aim to show how Algeria's colonial past is used in order to express a feeling of injustice and to denounce the contempt and violence of the ruling ...

After the first round of the presidential elections in Mali, which predictably favored Ibrahim Boubacar Keita, the reactions oscillated between criticism of the context in which the poll was conducted and a performative optimism (especially in France where the juvenile enthusiasm of the ruling Socialist Party was close to ridiculous). There was a widespread eagerness to translate a limited military victory into a political victory, even while the relevant historical ...

The President of the Popular Algerian Republic left the country on 27 April 2013 to be hospitalized in Paris at Val-de-Grâce, following a non-fatal stroke. Since then, Bouteflika’s absence has provoked an increasing anxiety. The French press has reported on the worsening of his health, which was subsequently printed in various Algerian newspapers. Despite Prime Minister Abdelmalek Sellal's denial of these reports, the uncertainties regarding his succession (which appears ...

[On 17 October 1961, tens of thousands of Algerian protesters peacefully demonstrated against violations against their civil liberties in Paris. In the midst of the war of Independence (1954 – 1962), the FLN (Front de libération nationale) was engaged in a violent struggle against France that relied on the mobilization within the Metropole as well as combat in Algeria. As a result of FLN activities, the prefecture of police French state imposed a curfew on all of the ...

The military blitz by rebels in Northern Mali is far from inconsequential for its Algerian neighbor. The hypothetical secession of the Azawad (in the northern half of Mali) is not viewed favorably in Algeria, to say the least. In addition to the threat of instability across the country's southern border, the Mouvement National de Libération de l’Azawad (MNLA) made the pragmatic choice to form a short-lived alliance with jihadists from Ansaar Eddine and Al-Qaeda in the ...